The Critical Commentator

  Courtesy is such a quiet force that its crumbling in formerly expected places can feel as shocking as a trusted handrail suddenly giving way... The flashiest slurs have emanated from the White House. In November President Trump aggrieved by a female reporter's question about Jeffrey Epstein, snapped back: "Quiet Piggy!" Earlier this month he dismissed Somali immigrants as "garbage". When the Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife were fatally stabbed... Trump suggested that Reiner's tragic death was caused by his negative stance on the president himself and because he suffered from a mind-crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome... The First Madness of Ophelia Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) Photo Credit: Gallery Oldham [CC BY-NC-ND]  Trash talk aimed at political opponents and journalists or socially divisive language, did not commonly feature in presidential statements... By maintaining decorum in their public speech, previous preside...

  A study from 2024 found that 45% of Gen Z and 39% of millennials were actively trying to reduce their screentime, a number I can only imagine is increasing daily. My rationale had less to do with being anti-phone - I don't think every second spent on a screen is inherently harmful - but more to do with the free time I was losing. There was a richer life being sacrificed for what was mostly a mind-numbingly bad habit. The prevailing argument for how to resolve phone addiction is that all you need to do is just stop... We're told it's a matter of grit and discipline, something most of us simply lack. There is now a thriving industry of apps and technology dedicated to getting you off  your phone, which operate on this vague assumption... These interventions do work for some people. But for most, they serve as a Sisyphean torment: that even if you do briefly log off, you find the nothingness excruciating and are struck with how badly you are itching to return. You're als...

  Perhaps no scandal conveys the rot in our world more than the Jeffrey Epstein affair... For this isn't a story about left and right: it is a story about right and wrong.More specifically it is about power; about how the rich and powerful of all political persuasions live by a different set of rules from everyone else, not just in America but throughout the western world... The story we like to tell ourselves is equality under the law... But this fairy tale has now become an object of derision for millions of "ordinary" people  - me included and perhaps you too. Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime Amy J. Curr  (active 1885-1894} Photo Credit: Aberdeen Archives, Galleriy & Museums [Public Domain]  How could it be otherwise when dozens of vulnerable children were trafficked, abused and threatened by Epstein and other rich men but not a single one of those men has been brought to justice beyond Epstein himself? The only person serving time is Ghislaine Maxw...

  As I apply for yet another job, I look at the company's website for context. I've now read their "what we do" section four or five times, and I have a problem - I can't figure out what they do. There are two possibilities here. One: they don't know what they do. Two: what they do is so pointless and embarrassing that they dare not spell it out in plain English. "We forge marketing systems at the forefront of the online wellness space" translates to something like "we use ChatGPT to sell dodgy supplements. But understanding what so many businesses actually do is the least of my worries. I'm currently among the 5% of Brits who are unemployed. In my six months of job hunting, my total lack of success has begun to make me question my own existence. About one in five of my job applications elicit a rejection email, usually bemoaning the sheer number of "quality applicants" for the position. For the most part, though - nothing. It'...

 Some of Berlin's most renowned clubs have long insisted that the camera lenses on their clientele's phones must be covered up to ensure that everyone is present in the moment and people can let go without fear of their image suddenly appearing somewhere online. Venues in London, Manchester and New York now enforce the same rules... phones will either be stickered or forbidden. "People need to stop taking pictures and start dancing to the beat," said one of the club's original founders. The Dance of Spring Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864-1933) Photo credit: Glasgow Life Museums. [CC BY-NC-ND] He is right, but it seems the zeitgeist might be aligning in that direction anyway. If 2025 has had any kind of defining cultural theme, it perhaps boils down to people's increasing sense that a life completely beholden is no life at all. To this, add two connected trends: a drop in millions of people's use of social media, and a rising yearning for experiences that are ...

  MPs have accepted almost £300,000 of tickets to sports matches, concerts, red carpet film awards and theatre trips in the last year, prompting questions about how such freebies could influence their decision making. Included in the gifts handed to politicians were Glastonbury tickets from Google, FA Cup final hospitality from the Football Association (FA), and a gift hamper from a Middle Eastern dictatorship. Politicians attended concerts by artists including Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran and Sam Fender. There is no limit, beyond public criticism, of the value of gifts that MPs can claim from individuals and companies from the UK as long as they are declared on the members register of interests. Charing Cross Bridge Claude Monet (1840-1926) Photo Credit: Museum Wales [Public Domain]  Some gifts on the register, such as attendance at industry dinners or tickets to local festivals, could be reasonably argued to be part of MPs' community work. Others are harder to justify, such as the £...

  Nnena Kalu has won the 2025 Turner prize for her colourful drawings and sculptures made from fabric and VHS tape . Here's an art critic describing her work. Nnena Kalu's forms come at you with their almost alien presence. ( What?) They bulge and bifurcate and multiply. ( Really?) The viewer gets caught up in all the roaring, spilling, snagging details, and you begin to wonder about your own boundaries, the body's beginnings and its endings. ( I am beginning to wonder but not about boundaries, beginnings and endings, yet.) The closer you get to Kalu's endless sinewy trails of old VHS tape, their spews of filigree plastic webbing, their bound-up, sometimes cable-tied suturings, the harder it is to know where their forms stop and the space around them begins. ( Am I on an operating table?)  Their containment is precarious.(  I think I must be and  things don't look too good.) So full of life and energy, you think they might burst. ( Sweet Lord, I haven't mad...

  The White House spokeperson Karoline Leavitt today furiously attacked the failing news media for editing together two clips of Donald Trump in order to try and make him look like a misogynist bully. The clip, which appeared on live television, shows the President of the United States snapping at a female reporter "Quiet, Piggy!" Gloucester Old Spot Pig Page (active  19th C) Photo Credit  Museum of English Rural Life [CC BY-NC-SA] Said Miss Leavitt, "This was two separate sections of the President's reply spliced together into a disgraceful and defamatory soundbite. He firstly said, 'Quiet please, everyone, I'm trying to listen to this excellent female reporter's very good question about the Epstein files'. He later made a key policy statement in which he said, 'Fozzy Bear is okay, Kermit not a nice frog, but the only Muppet character I have any time for is Miss Piggy'." Miss Leavitt continued, "Quiet Piggy is the worst piece of mal...

  Social media platforms such as TikTok are hosting AI-generated deepfake videos of doctors whose words have been manipulated to help sell supplements and spread health misinformation. The factchecking organisation Full Fact has uncovered hundreds of such videos featuring impersonated versions of doctors and influencers directing viewers to a US-based supplements firm. The Charlatan Franz van Mieris the elder (1635-1681) Photo Credit:  City of London Corporation [CC BY-NC]  All the deepfakes involve real footage of a healthcare expert taken from the internet. However, the pictures have been reworked using AI so that the speakers are encouraging women going through menopause to buy products such as probiotics and Himalayan shilajit... "This is certainly a sinister and worrying new tactic," said Leo Benedictus, the Full Fact factchecker who undertook its investigation, which it published yesterday. Prof David Taylor-Robinson, an expert in health inequalities at Liverpool Un...

  Prof Sir Magdi Habib Yacoub is a retired professor of cardiothoracic surgery who established the heart transplantation centre at Harefield hospital. He performed the first combined heart and lung transplant in the UK, and set up the Chain of Hope charity, which helps to provide heart operations for children. He was born in Egypt in 1935 but moved to the UK in 1961. Portrait of a Doctor Francis Picabia (1879-1953) Photo Credit:: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] "I'm totally committed to the NHS because I practised in other countries, including the US, and I am totally convinced that it is the best system. Why? Because it maintains the sacred relationship between the patient and the doctor. Obviously there are problems, and issues with funding, but  it remains the best system in the world. Ask a British person if they want to have the very best treatment  for themselves and their family, they will say yes. And then you ask them if they want to have the same for their neighbour, it's st...

 L ike triple-distilled whiskey, Irish pubs appear to have timeless appeal. They are staple settings in films, books and plays, draw tourists to Ireland, replicate themselves around the world and induce social media quests for the perfect snug and the perfect pint... Irish pubs are in trouble. They are vanishing from rural Ireland and many are struggling to survive in the capital... Since 2005, Ireland has lost a quarter of its pubs, more than 2,100, averaging 112 closures a year. Reasons cited include high taxes on alcohol, drink-driving laws, rising property prices and a fall in alcohol consumption... Boors Carousing Dutch School Photo Credit York Art Gallery [Public Domain]  Just over half of the population live within 300 metres of Ireland's 7,000 pubs and Share [Perry Share, a co-editor of The Irish Pub] said, pubs remained central to expressions of Irish culture. "Even if declining, the pub is still part of the fabric of everyday life," he added. "If it does di...

  When Tom Stoppard visited the refugee camp in Calais once known as the jungle , where thousands waited to cross the Channel , he was asked by a journalist whether it was possible that Britain's goodwill was being exploited by would-be immigrants and asylum seekers. Tom replied that such a thing might indeed be a possibility but that, even if it were, this was an argument about which he was happy to be historically on the wrong side. This reply has always seemed to me the most resonant remark made by any public figure in the last 20 years. It is hard to think of anyone else who would approach the question of illegal immigration with such concision and characteristic generosity. The Pipe of Freedom Thomas Stuart Smith (1813/14-1869) Photo Credit:The Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum [ CC BY-NC-ND ] As an immigrant himself from Czechoslovakia , Tom did more than any other playwright or novelist in his own lifetime to redefine Brtishness as something freedom-loving and open-...